


Wind from the Aft, Sun to Port

by Anonymous



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters: X & Y | Pokemon X & Y Versions
Genre: Gen, Look at all these bros broing it up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-20
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 10:34:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1144938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But on a day like today, who can be bothered to leave the shore?</p>
<p>For all your friendshipping needs. A selection of short fics set in or around Lumiose City, centering around pals, bros, and hatefriends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Gentille Alouette

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We'll pluck the feathers from your wings (from your wings), from your back (from your back), from your head (from your head). What's a spot of violent manslaughter between friends?

 They would never admit to having traditions. They don't see each other nearly often enough for that, and besides, traditions take time and energy to produce.

They stare each other down over matching lattes, Malva smirking as if she has the upper-hand. Mable, not to be one-upped, very casually grabs her wrist, pulls the flowery cheese danish in Malva's hand towards her and, unblinking, takes a large bite.

Too large, really, and she ends up breathing very carefully around it, trying to chew without choking. But the nature and margin of her victory is irrelevant, because Malva breaks. “What are you, two? You've been hanging around the lesbians too long.”

“You cannot just call them 'the lesbians,' Malva.”

“You gonna stop me, bluebird?” Malva whistles the first few bars of alouette, and Mable kicks her shin with her heel, snickering when as impact of plastic on bone breaks Malva's usually steady voice off at the knees.

“Keep it up, we will see who leaves here without and limbs.”

“Morbid fucking song anyway.”

“Which is why the children adore it.”

“Yeah, I bet the whole skinning things alive racket really appealed t'you as a little Kanton Doll, didn't it?”

“I am going to put a speculum in your mouth and very slowly dislocate your jaw if you keep calling me that.”

Malva knocks their shoulders together, grinning that horrible news anchor smile of hers. The one that Mable wishes she could imitate, because it screams of cruelty and keen eyes without the underlying suggestion of murder that always seems to taint her own expressions. Or perhaps that was just the corpse-blue lipstick.

“C'mon then, I wanna see how long it takes before we can talk some asshole on the north boulevard to let us up into his room and steal some towels.”

“Oh, but I am the one who is a child in this relationship.”

Malva wolf whistles obnoxiously, and Mable tries the sentence again in her mind, looking for the error she won't find. Kalosian is a stupid language full of too many gapholes that don't match up with her native, Johton ones.

“A _relationship_ now, are we? My, my, I'll have to call my agent before the tabloids pick it up.” Mable still doesn't know what she's said wrong, but she does crunch her boot down on Malva's toes again before she can adopt her cocky, neutrally accented news voice.

“We are colleagues, thus, we are in a relationship,” Mable corrects primly. “Otherwise I would have tied you down and made my acquaintance with your,” She pauses, trying to recall the word. It isn't one that comes up in conversation often. “How does one say _suizou_? The organ that releases digestive enzymes?”

Malva shrugs gleefully, guiding them down one of her preferred back allies to cut through to North Boulevard, sweeping her eyes in all directions and looking for a fight. “How should I know? I'm just here to be the pretty face, _Scientist_.”

“Communications is not a science, Malva, this cannot be helped.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, look sharp I think those suits are gonna be good.”

Mable takes a moment to question why in the name of all the birds and dogs and deer that make up the pantheon of her mad life she continues to consort with idiots. Then, she looks in the direction Malva is gesturing, and freezes.

They cannot recognize her, of course. She looks nothing like the self they knew. But she recognizes them, and with a choking curl of fear in the back of her throat, she realizes they have noticed that. She has tied her own noose, with wide eyes and tense shoulders, and she can already imagine the conclusions they are drawing. She is far too young to be the Doctor, but a niece or even granddaughter?

Malva sees nothing of particular interest about them, but it isn't like Mable to go all paralytic pansy on her, just over a couple of backstreet punks in cheap polyester. She might be jumping to conclusions but, well, Mable's really persnickety about why she left Johto, and these guys are definitely Asian. “Hey, not to be that person or anything, but, you know these guys right?”

“ _Roketto-dan_.”

“You wanna try that one again?”

Things fall apart fairly quickly from there, and Malva has exactly zero idea what the hell is happening when the thugs in suits start bellowing about their moms or... _something_. She doesn't exactly speak Kanton. But she speaks pokémon, and when Mable starts going for the ball on her belt, Malva takes her cue, and the alley is suddenly very crowded, between her own Pyroar, the bizarrely enormous Weezing, Mable's looming Houndoom and the matching devildog on the opposition side.

This isn't the first time Malva and Mable have fought side-along, though, and Mable might not be an especially talented battle trainer, but Malva more than is. She's third in the damn region, and if these punks think they get to piss all over _her_ friend, they are sorely mistaken.

For the second time that afternoon, Malva breaks the silence first, calling flamethrower with the precise inflection that her Pyroar knows refers to the leftmost opponent, in this case the weezing. She doesn't hear Mable's call, behind all the racket of the suits countering, but she doesn't need to. Helga has her jaws open wide in a textbook Snarl. The unnatural, piercing cry guttering up form somewhere in her throat has the Weezing and the other Houndoom both flinching, unable to counter, and it takes only seconds for her Pyroar's expertly applied Flamethrower to leave the Weezing a charred, unconscious heap on the ground.

She puts one arm around Mable's shoulders, and Mable flinches at the contact, but calls her next move in perfect sync with Malva all the same. The fact that she is still speaking in Kanton doesn't change anything.

“Crunch.”

“ _Kamikudaku_.”

The Pyroar and Helga fall on the opposing Houndoom with identical viciousness, the line between feline and canine blurred in the joint action of pack/pride, and there is plenty of time for them both to have blood on their mouths and leave the wet snap of broken bones echoing in the alley before the thug recalls his little doggie.

They look like they're about to run, and Mable, with her voice steadied by victory, calls a final attack. “ _Hedoro bakudan_.”

Helga coughs once, and stinking purple sludge slams into the face of the nearer of the two, choking him. He is going to die in an alleyway in a foreign country, and, reassured by the fact that it will be him, and not herself, Mable strides forward, Helga falling into line beside her, Malva and her Pyroar taking the rear. As one, they advance on the remaining thug, cowering disgustingly before them. “Tell your _kanbu_ , was it Athena? Tell her that Momiji- _hakase_ is well and truly dead, and anyone sent to collect her _will join her_.”

The rat scurries off, and Mable does not allow herself to sag against Malva's side, because they aren't that sort of friend. But really, what kind of friend does anyone need, other than the kind that will help you clean up a murder scene?

Helga and the Pyroar are recalled, and in the same gesture Malva releases her Chandelure. She commands smog first, to create a barrier of toxic fog that is firmly under the ghost's control, then a simple flame burst to start the body roasting to inconclusive ash. Through that, her voice is professionally calm. Once they have settled on the hard cobblestones, back to back as mutual chair-rests to wait out the hour or so it will take for the body to burn, politely ignoring the occasional noise that muffles out from beneath the cloud as the man finishes up the business of dying, however, her tone becomes a little less measured.

“You want to, maybe, I don't know, _explain that one_?”

“I do not want to, no.”

“Yeah, no, let's try that again. You're going to explain that one. Slowly, and in great detail. I did not plan on manslaughter today, Queen Mab.”

“I am not a fairy, I am not a kanton doll, is it so difficult to call me by my name?”

“Yeah, your name. Your conspicuously Kalosian name. The one you definitely changed when you got your visa, which you never talk about. Nope. We're doing this.”

“Momiji is a dead woman's name.”

“So I fucking gathered.”

Mable sighs deeply, her shoulders moving against Malva's own and her head tips back to crack against Malva's skull as she acquiesces. “Very well, then. A fairy tale for the fairy queen.”

“That's what I thought.”

“Close your mouth and listen, I will not go through it a second time. When I was doctor Momiji of Johto, I was part of the team which discovered, researched, and eventually altered the pokérus.”

Malva inhales sharply, the muscles in her back going tense, and Mable does not especially need to hear the question to know what it will be, so she continues quickly. “I am much older than you think, yes. Somewhere in my sixties, I have lost the count. There are strange, strange pokémon in Johto, if you know where to find them. Ones that will grant impossible things. I fell into disfavor with, with the _Roketto-dan_. I suppose they are the Team, as Flare is. The Team Rocket.

“I was not under their employ initially, but the head of our research team was. I was expected to be loyal to them, and I was not. They were imbeciles, to the last one. No vision, no ambition, fighting towards an aimless goal. But they were also dangerous, so I did what was expected of me. I learned, over time, to adore my work, even as I despised the ends to which it was being put. I was _there,_ you know, _present_ at the first recorded evolution of a Slowking. It was exhilarating, but they were despicable. And when they were attacked by a pair of trainers, I fled.

“Getting out of the Region was my first and only thought. Somewhere that they could not follow me, but where I might put my skills to use. And to that end, I traveled to the forest of _Ubame_ , and sought the shrine. You might even, I think, call it the shrine of the fairy queen. I would be surprised if the god who dwells there were not one of them.

“I do not know what happened, after I met _Serebii_ and begged of it a second life, beyond that I awoke in this city, practically a child again, younger than I had been in years _._ The body was mine, in all the old, familiar ways, except that my hair and eyes were marked the same blue the forest god wore on its edges. I found that years had passed, but then, _Serebii_ is the master of time, flitting through it easily, so that was no surprise.

“I did not expect that Team Rocket would still be active. Every record on the matter suggested the trainers who gave me my escape had destroyed them thoroughly. But it would appear that I was quite incorrect.”

Mable shrugs, then rolls her shoulders forward, spine cracking at the pull of tension. “Or perhaps it was a coincidence that they should be here, today. Maybe I have killed a man for no real reason, other than being a member of a vile, thieving pool of scum.”

Malva says nothing, and Mable falls into a matching silence.

The Chandelure comes back to Malva, in time, and its cloud of smog dissipates as soon as it is recalled. The ashes on the ground are not particularly damning, so they stay a while longer, back to back, considering different things in the same way.

Malva moves first, still quiet, rolling onto her feet with an easy grace, and Mable falls over flat at the sudden loss of support, before glaring up at her from the cobblestone. Malva is smiling, thin and lopsided, and perfectly genuine. She offers Mable a hand in standing, then jerks it away as soon as Mable moves to accept, because she, in fact, a child. Mable stands under her own power, and stares Malva down.

Mable grabs at Malva's wrist. Pulls it towards her. Meets her eyes unblinking, and puts her thumb between her teeth, and bites down, _hard_.

Malva hisses and jerks back, spitting on Mable's shoe petulantly, and says “What are you, _two_? Fucking hell, see if I ever invite you to go steal nice towels on some jackass's tab at the Richissime again!”

Mable hums the first few bars of alouette, and they set off towards North Boulevard, as if nothing has changed, because nothing has.


	2. Inchoate Offense

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Burglary, as a preliminary step to another crime, can be seen as an inchoate, or incomplete, offense. Then again, these pants are probably criminal too.

 Bryony Blanche Racine was not very fond of her name. Not that it was an _awful_ name, especially. Though, it was a bit stupid, being named after plant roots. And she would never stop regretting actually looking up the history of the plant when she was eleven. But it was not a terrible name. She just didn't like it.

Every year, on her birthday, she promised herself she would have it changed. Given that she was unlikely to get be married and take on a husband's name, this seemed the thing to do. Every year, instead, she got astonishingly drunk, considered calling her mother, decided against it, and baked an alarming quantity of pastries.

Primarily pies, but sometimes cakes, or cookies, or baklava, or, last year, a seven foot tall croquembouche, for which she had, apparently, left midway through to buy a stand and step ladder. At least in theory. She couldn't remember anything from her twenty sixth birthday, but that was her best guess.

She liked baking well enough. It wasn't something she was unusually talented at, nor would she ever have considered it beyond the limits of a hobby, but it was a pleasant divergence from her studies and day job, while still appealing to her preference for precision. Recipes were often forgiving. But pastries were _not_. The slightest variation in the temperature of the butter or the weight of the flour could completely change results.

The day after her twenty seventh birthday, she awoke as per the norm with a thudding headache, blocked sinuses, dry mouth, and the general sensation that she'd stuffed her head full of wet sponges. The desserts were a soupy recollection somewhere in the mash of her muddled thoughts, and she recalled something about mint, chocolate and very possibly chevre. She wasn't entirely certain, but she had her suspicions.

She would, ultimately, have to drag herself into her kitchen to find out what monstrosities she had produced. She detoured for the bathroom instead. She had arranged for the day off from Fleur-de-Lis over a month ago, in preparation for this precise situation, and was glad of her forethought. It meant that when she drew half a bath while begrudgingly brushing the film off her teeth and tongue, then collapsed into the water and switched on the shower head instead, she was able to lie there completely void of movement until the overflow drain gurgled into action.

She deeply considered stayed exactly where she was even longer, because she could, and because the glubbing of the drain and soft white noise of the shower head were pleasantly neutral to her aching skull. Also, she did enjoy being able to breathe again thanks to the steam.

But by now Caprice and Sergine were almost certainly planning mutiny, and there were unknowable pastries in the kitchen which begged to settle her aching stomach. Pastries which would be into the two pokémon's stomachs if she didn't feed them sooner or later. Sergine might be willing to wait respectfully, but Caprice was as she was named, and had only become more so since her recent evolution into a longer, leaner, and more arrogant Liepard.

Bryony shut off the water with a small huff of annoyance, but resisted the siren call to lay back in the bath. Still, in the name of optimism, she didn't pull the drain. Perhaps she could feed the pests, collect a chocolate-mint-cheese... were they tarts? She thought they might have been tarts- and go back to soaking before the water cooled too significantly.

Alone in her apartment, with the blinds on the only window drawn, she didn't bother wrapping herself in a towel. Why should she? It was the middle of summer, she wouldn't be cold. The cheap carpet wouldn't be slippery if she dripped lazily all over it. And she had no one to hide herself from but Sergine and Caprice. If she had been fearful of _them_ looking on her, then she would probably have a very different set of problems.

These were all excellent reasons to stroll nakedly around her home, hungover and grumpy in her post-birthday haze.

Thus it was only reasonable, in the grand scheme, that they prove immediately untenable the precise moment she opened the bathroom door, and nearly squashed a betrayed looking litleo.

The full implications of the poor kitten's presence didn't set in for a moment, which she spent staring down at his wide, black eyes, while he shivered and mewled, the tail she had nearly crushed curled forlornly between his over-sized paws.

“Merde.” She informed him very flatly, as her pickled brain began to turn at a rough approximation of her normal speed, just quickly enough that she was not taken _entirely_ by surprise to see a hulk of a man in a finely tailored black suit staring very pointedly at the shuttered window. That at least explained the silence in her apartment. No doubt he'd let Caprice and her dutiful sidekick out to prowl around the city like wild beasts. “I'm going to have you charged with breaking and entering.”

“Yes,” Lysandre agreed while she slunk back into the bathroom to collect a towel, and a robe for good measure. “That would probably be for the best. Should I report myself to the ethics committee, or will you be handling that as well?”

It was not a bathrobe, and the fluffy polyester fleece clung to her damp skin disgustingly, even after she'd patted herself down as best she could, and wrapped the towel tightly around her hair.

“What the raging _fuck_ are you doing here? Sexually assaulting innocent virgins in their homes?”

“Reminding them to lock their front doors.”

Bryony squinted suspiciously through him, trying to read him for a lie- a futile effort, the man was almost entirely incapable of discomfort- while searching her spotty memory. She could remember kicking the door shut, hands full of two enormous mesh grocery bags, but the click of the deadbolt didn't seem to be anywhere in that.

“I am completely sure that doesn't legitimize strolling into your subordinate's home unannounced while they're bathing, though.”

“No. No, I imagine it doesn't.”

“You should definitely stop doing that. It's becoming an issue, this whole 'I own the entire world' thing.”

“You can take it up with my mother, if you like.”

“Yes. That's my new plan for the day.” Her vowels were stretched around the beginnings of a grin, which she bit down on stubbornly. She shouldn't encourage him. She really shouldn't. “I'll just go and hire one of the insane psychics wandering around route fourteen. You can pay for new boots when I ruin mine, sloshing in the swamps. You'll be coming with me, of course.”

“Or,” He offered with the same stupid, indulgent smile he was always using before giving her jobs that they both knew would leave her staring dead eyed and vacant at screens after twenty hour shifts. The sort that would simultaneously destroy her health, and give her the brutal, technical challenge that she was addicted to. There was a reason he'd started paying for her graduate studies, after all. “You could put on something a little less amphibious, and we could go and see the new storefront.”

“The wh- oh _piss_ , are you serious? It's today?”

“Well, it won't be available to the public for another few weeks, of course. But we're finalizing the menu, and I could use a trustworthy second opinion.”

Bryony snorted quietly, sliding the towel off her head to chuck at him with a damp thwap. “Can't trust your pet doctor?”

She didn't even need to look at him to know the precise face that went with that carefully noncommittal noise. _Almost_ entirely incapable of discomfort.

“Come and help me pick an outfit then, you gigantic cockup.”

“One day someone is going to take you by the tongue and cut it out entirely.”

“Alas, it's not your lucky day, boss, now come and be fashionable for me.” She stared very hard at her hand, as it turned the doorknob to her bedroom. The headache was coming back, with her brief jolt of adrenaline at being caught unawares by an enormous asshole with poofy hair beginning to fade. “I'm losing track of where my limbs are again. I'll put on something _hideous_ if you don't save me from my alcohol impaired judgment.”

“You'll put on something hideous to spite me, you mean.”

“Fringe benefits. I have to keep you around for something, you know.”

She stared very hard at her wardrobe, until Lysandre took the hint and opened it himself, rifling through the hanging shirts and dresses, while Bryony snickered quietly. Not quietly enough that he couldn't hear, of course, but quietly enough that they could both pretend he couldn't. Even years later, it was still a ridiculous sight, his gigantic hands pawing through her selection of frilly neon clothes. He _was_ better at it than her, though. Aside from the insistence on always trying to get her into a dress.

“Here,” He offered her a rich burgundy pencil skirt and a flouncy pastel yellow blouse which she, personally, would never have paired. Particularly not now that her hair was a cool pansage green. But they did look impressive together, the colors setting each other off nicely. _Still_.

“The skirts, always with the skirts. Try again.”

She delighted in the fact that he _actually_ rolled his eyes, bouncing cheerfully in her robe.

“You realize that the entire purpose of a pencil cut is-”

“Summer,” She trilled, “I want to show of my legs _properly_ , not imply they're there. Suck it up and do your magic, or I really _will_ report you for breaking into my home and letting my poor, precious Pawniard out into the world all alone and unsupervised.”

“You wouldn't.”

“No, but the threat is why you love me.”

Lysandre hummed tightly and she could imagine the frown that he was no doubt trying to make. But he enjoyed the dress-up games as much as she did. Once, when he had been spectacularly drunk, he had gone on for twenty full minutes about how it was unfair that women could wear nicer clothes than him, and things had degenerated from there. Hidden deeply away on the encrypted triple-redundant servers at work there was a solitary photo of him attempting and _dramatically_ failing to wear a horrific lycra mess of what had probably once been a sundress. He'd been much skinnier then, still half adolescent, but broad in the shoulders and already much too tall for anything off the rack.

“Fine, here.” He did not throw the shorts at her, because he wasn't 'an ill mannered hooligan,' (manners not extending to residential property, apparently). But she could tell he wanted to. She stared at the shorts for a very long moment.

These were definitely not hers. She would remember buying them, even if she'd somehow collected them during the blank haze last night. There were stripes. _Holographic vinyl stripes_ , chunky and glittery against the white terrycloth, which was cut without a hem to curl up messily, the legs _barely_ extending past the inseam.

She was still staring at them, suspiciously now, and with a distinct frown, when he handed her a black camisole and one of the enormous gauzy white half-shirts that she had bought on a sale and never actually worn _,_ because she had nothing to wear them with. “I assume you still have the white boots. Would you prefer with or without stockings?”

“Are you damned kidding me?”

Lysandre was staring down at her now, with one ridiculously well groomed eyebrow arched in a gesture that she was almost entirely certain he literally practiced in front of the mirror.

“Well, if you don't like them-”

Bryony hugged the shorts to her chest dearly and snarled in a fashion which she suspected would have put Caprice to cowering. The litleo who had cheerfully clambered atop her dresser was certainly put off by it. “Absolutely not, get out, I have to put them on _now_.”

They weren't even that great. She'd probably never actually wear them again. The stripes were _ridiculous_ , and the cut was short even by her standards. But the idea of Lysandre actually going into a shop and _buying_ them was too much to let pass unflaunted.

She shimmied into the outfit as quickly as she could manage without tearing anything, and after studying her bare legs critically, went for the stockings after all. Her best pair of opaque black nylon still left a gap of bare skin longer than her hand, and she did not squeal because that would be _stupid beyond measure_ , but she did bounce on her toes like an idiot and breathe out very hard in the attempt not to.

Black and white saddled ankle boots completed the ensemble, and she stared at herself in the cheap glued on mirror behind her door. Her hair was a mess, curling into silly stringy beach waves as it dried. The gauze top slanted off one shoulder slouchily, pulling the other side's hem at an angle to really show off the smooth black of the camisole where it clung to her waist. A strip of bare skin, before the first glaring, shining stripe of vinyl. Three more of those. More skin. More black.

She couldn't decide if she looked like one of the fashionably disheveled magazine models, or some sort of mad hobo gone horribly wrong.

Either way, though, she was going to turn heads.

She turned around once, slowly, and watched the stripes change color iridescently, before flinging open the door hard enough that it banged against the wall.

The poor, beleaguered litleo squalled and ran for the kitchen, while Bryony struck a pose, hands raised as if to display invisible prizes on a daytime quiz show. The overall effect was marred somewhat by the painfully wide grin pulling at her cheeks. “This is the worst birthday gift anyone has ever gotten me. I hope they were so expensive you cried.”

“Tears were definitely shed.”

“Come on then, let's go torment your chefs. I hope you have cash for a taxi though,” She added as a wave of nauseous exhaustion washed through her in the wake of the excitement. “I'm not walking all the way to Magenta from here with this head and these boots. I will die, and then you'll have to get and hire some idiot off the streets to handle your user-interface.”

Lysandre offered her his elbow with complete sincerity, and she let herself laugh, loudly three times. She almost wished she had another mirror, but she could visualize the scene well enough. Gigantic, looming Lysandre and his pyroarian mane, all in crisp black lines, professional to the point of dangerous formality, with a short, neon green hipster-bohemian in white gauze and glitter hanging off him. “Oh, we'll make a pair, won't we. All the contrasts you can shove in a single bucket without someone's eyes bleeding.”

“Well, there's a reason we're in monochrome.”


End file.
